I was talking to Kefka in global chat, and he mentioned to bring the topic up here.
Mythics, as we all know, are a very scare and rare creature. Some of the most unique and powerful troops, and the most difficult to get. Pulling a duplicate just feels awful.
My main suggestion is to make it so that the $50 options (Growth Pack II, Path to Glory II, Path to Power II) do not give you a mythic that you already have. I feel like this one is the most important to address, because it does feel really bad to wait 30 days, and have spent the cash (yes, I know you get traitstones in return, but you are also buying a mythic), and get something that you already have. And I’m talking from experience, I only had 1 mythic, and got a duplicate of that mythic through the Growth Pack II. That was terrible letdown, one I still feel regret to this day about.
My second suggestion would be to make it so that when you pull a mythic from Gem, Glory, or Guild keys, that you get something you don’t have. Now, I know this is probably a little more sensitive, but I really think that player happiness would go up if this were implemented. Hearthstone did something similar in their game in that you’ll not pull another duplicate legendary (their highest quality) until you have all the legendaries from that card pack, and community response was overwhelmingly positive.
Another option for duplicate mythics pulled from chests (I still strongly believe that the real money one should not give you a duplicate) is some sort of trade-in system where you can destroy a base-quality mythic into some quantity (1000/2000/3000) of diamonds.
I think that all the players would want something like this, it’s just a matter of whether or not this is financially feasible to the devs / publishers. But I would like to at least have some sort of candid conversation with the powers that be, because I do think this would make the game better.
I do wholeheartedly agree with your plight. While most likely this will not happen as soulforge was a response to this sentiment in terms of the chests already. As for the growth packs and path to glory packs, I especially think it would be more profitable in the latter as then since mythics are released on a monthly basis, if you want to guarantee get it, you can pay up front to plan on getting at least one copy. Based on chest drop rates, selling gems would be more profitable, but that assumes the regular gem packs sell like crazy. $50 is still a lot for any troop, but is an easier pill to swallow instead of spending enough for a PS4 or Xbox one.
This is also another reason why something like this is required which this games doesn’t seem to take into account: catching up mechanisms.
An old player has a bunch of resources stockpiled, all kingdoms leveled, most or even all troops in the game including all mythics and can just consume the new content at a reasonable pace.
A new player has to do all that from the beginning. It is a big pile of things to do on which the game updates keep adding more on it. For instance look at delves and gold. For someone who already has all the kingdoms at level 10, gold was just something that went towards guilds. Now we have delves so I spend 1M gold or however much it is on each delve. Can you imagine how this feels for a new player? Where you see more delves being added, more kingdoms being added and you still try to upgrade the kingdoms?
I suspect in the future we’ll get more ways to spend gems, souls, traitstones etc. This will be so simple and natural for long time players who have these resources stockpiled but it will become more daunting to new players.
The solution to this is having catch-up mechanism. Don’t force new players to spend time in content no longer relevant and have the end game further and further away from them. Someone starting the game now has little to no chance of ever getting all the mythics because a new one is released every month. No one is pulling 2+ mythincs each month.
So catch up mechanism for these kind of things is this suggestion right here, with preventing duplicate mythics (especially since we keep getting more of them) or/and slowly increasing the drop chance of old mythics. Maybe increase the chance of a troop every 3 moths so those who were around for a long time are more likely to drop.
A catch-up mechanism requiring that new players spend $50/month must surely sound pretty good to the publishers. But would sales of Path to Glory II increase if the mythic was guaranteed to be new? I imagine someone, somewhere, has data to suggest what the effect would be on income.
The duplicate mythic that bothers me most is the $50 one. I have always complained that $50 is too steep for a mythic in the first place, but the cherry on top of my “never buy this ever” analysis is you don’t even know if you’ll get a unique mythic, let alone a good one.
Someone out there has paid $50 for a 2nd Gargantaur. I’d quit the game.
The other ideas for players… I agree from a selfish standpoint, but don’t think that’ll gain a lot more traction. The thing is our brains don’t work the way we think they do. That it’s so hard to get all the mythics is precisely why so many people are still here after a year+. Making it easier, from the viewpoint of game design, means people feel “done” faster and move on.
Again, to be clear: I want that improvement, but I think the “at least let us disenchant them to diamonds” idea is more likely long-term.
The situation gets more complex as we get more “useful” mythics. There are really only 3-5 mythics you need. That’s not an obscenely long wait for Soulforge, considering you’re also waiting to get legendaries and fill out the other troops. But if the meta required more like 8-12 mythics somehow, we’d have a stronger argument.
I mean, keep in mind as-is you’re facing only ~1/40 odds you get a “good” mythic from any of the random things if you have 0. That’s the real state of a player playing “catch-up”. If the only mythic you need is Infernus, you don’t really care if you get a second War vs. a brand-new Phoenicia. Neither is Infernus.
The only thing I agree with is that paid packs should never contain a duplicate mythic (I, too, became a victim of that). But it should definitely remain a possibility coming from chests. There is an opportunity to craft mythics you don’t have, so that’s already covered. If every mythic you’d receive from chests would be unique, it would severely cripple the economy of this game. You might say that this is a good thing for the user, but in the end less income on this game for dev/publisher also translates to less content/efforts being made/done for this game.
Besides, the chance of duplicates is part of the charm in this game design.
So YES on getting rid of duplicates on bought content.
NOPE on getting rid of duplicates altogether.
